Playmate on the way for Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia

Kate Winslet's eight-year-old daughter Mia is about to have either a
half-brother or a half-sister. The Titanic star’s former husband Jim
Threapleton tells Mandrake that his second wife Julie is expecting a baby.

Kate Winslet with Jim Threapleton announcing their engagement. They divorced in 2001Photo: PA

Mandrake by Tim Walker

9:13PM BST 11 Oct 2008

“She is in the mid stages of her pregnancy and as yet we don’t know what sex the baby will be,” says Threapleton, 34, who directed the film Extraordinary Rendition and is currently at work on a new thriller called Exposure.

“Obviously we hope that our child will get to know Mia and take his or her place in the extended family.”

The Reading-born Miss Winslet is “delighted” by the news. Threapleton, who divorced Miss Winslet in 2001 after three years of marriage, remains on good terms with her. He married Julie, a school administrator, this year.

Miss Winslet subsequently married the film director Sam Mendes with whom she had a son, Joe, in 2003. Threapleton said that he and his new American wife are both close to Joe – as he is confident that Kate and Sam will be able to form an equally close friendship with their child when it arrives early in the New Year.

Threapleton met Miss Winslet, 33, while working as an assistant director on the film Hideous Kinky in which she starred at the end of the 1990s. They famously had bangers and mash at their wedding.

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Miss Winslet shares homes with Mendes in Gloucester and New York. I am told that the Threapletons have visited them on a number of occasions and the two couples get along with each other very well.

Guarding Levy

While bodyguards can be tiresome for senior politicians, they do also give them a sense of status. These days it is usual for former prime ministers to be accorded them, yet Mandrake hears that Lord Levy continues to be accompanied by one.

Levy’s official duties as Middle East peace envoy ended when Tony Blair left office, yet I am told a decision was made that the multi-millionaire Labour peer — who was never charged after the investigation into the cash-for-honours affair — still required protection after a Home Office assessment.

The bodyguard is provided by the Community Security Trust, an organisation which specialises in protecting British Jews, but it is unclear whether the taxpayer is footing the bill. “We don’t comment on matters of security,” says a Home Office spokesman.

Non-U

One can only imagine that William Hanson, who at 18 is almost certainly Britain’s youngest etiquette expert and definitely the most ubiquitous, must groan every time he sees the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston.

As Hanson says, it’s vulgar and rather un-British to talk all the time about filthy lucre. “One’s bank is the only place it is appropriate to talk about money,” says the Clifton College old boy.

“Financial matters should always be kept out of polite conversation. It also embarrasses others and sometimes makes them feel ill at ease, which is intrinsically bad mannered.” Quite so.

Farwell, fast talker

Baroness Ashton of Upholland was Gordon Brown’s surprise choice to replace Peter Mandelson as Britain’s European Commissioner in Brussels.

While congratulating her on her appointment, the Bishop of Portsmouth said that he felt the Lancashire-accented peer spoke with such speed that it was often difficult to understand her. “At the end of one debate I passed her a note with a Gilbert and Sullivan quotation: 'This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter/Isn’t generally heard, and if it is, it doesn’t matter,’” he told fellow peers.